Taotao Mona

The chant is said out loud, in an ordinary voice, to nobody visible. Guella yan guello, dispensa ham. Grandmother and grandfather, excuse us. A man steps off the road into the halomtano’ with a machete and an empty rice sack, and before the shade closes over him he asks the owners of the ground for permission to walk on it. He asks again, separately, before he relieves himself. Whether he believes any of it is not really the question. His grandmother did it, the land has not changed hands in the way the deeds suggest, and the cost of forgetting is a fever that no clinic on Guam can name.

Taotao mo’na means the people of before. They are the CHamoru dead who stayed, and the sources are firmer about what they are not than about what they are. Not gods. Not ghosts in the drifting, sheeted sense. Laura Thompson, writing the Marianas up for the Bishop Museum in 1945, recorded them as men of superhuman strength who went on inhabiting and controlling their own districts after death, and quoted Gertrude Hornbostel’s blunter version: the taotaomona were formerly magas, the chiefs of the various localities. Death did not retire them. It only removed the part of them that could be argued with.

Underneath the word lies something older and far better documented. When the Jesuits landed in 1668 they found the anite, which Diego Luis de San Vitores first translated as the souls of the ancestors and later, once the mission turned combative, as demons. Families kept the skulls of their dead in baskets in the rafters of the house, with no altar, no niche and no ornament, left there in San Vitores’ faintly exasperated phrasing until the time came when they wanted to ask some favour. A specialist called a makana did the asking, for a fee, and could petition for victory in war, a good catch, the end of an illness. In the drought of June 1670, with the crops failing, the islanders went to the makanas and asked them to invoke the anite through the skulls that brought rain. Those skulls had a name of their own: maranan uchan, a miraculous thing for rain. An earlier Spanish voyage had already noted the bones being kept in the houses and anointed with coconut oil.

The word is younger than the thing it names. Thompson calls taotaomona evidently a post-Spanish concept, absent from the early reports in which anite is everywhere, and the CHamoru scholar Michael Lujan Bevacqua places its rise in the nineteenth century, after more than a hundred years of Spanish rule. The timing makes sense of the word itself. People of before only becomes a useful name once there is an unmistakable before, a rupture with a date attached. Catholicism did not sever the tie to the ancestors so much as bend it. The family dead who once ate at the table slid, over generations, toward the tricky and dangerous spirits of a pagan past for which the Church had no shelf.

What survived the bend intact was territory. When Hans Hornbostel went around Rota collecting place names in the 1920s, he discovered that not one islander had walked the whole of it, and Rota is forty-eight square miles. He had to hire five guides to cross it in sections. Each family’s ancestors held their own stretch of ground, and a stranger passing through could not sing, could not foul the earth, could not pick fruit, cut wood, take fish, dig yams, camp overnight or hunt fruit bats without asking first, and asking again for each separate liberty. Even then, Hornbostel noted, it was dangerous.

The address for all of this is usually a tree. The nunu, the banyan, drops its aerial roots into a curtain of secondary trunks and builds itself a hollow, shadowed room at ground level. Around the turn of the twentieth century William Safford was told by an old man on Guam that a great nunu had once stood where the two of them were standing, and that people would not pass it after nightfall because it was a resort for the manganiti. Guam still routes around them. Buildings at the University of Guam and other government sites were designed to leave the banyans exactly where they were, which is either heritage policy or hedging, and the island has never needed to decide.

There is no settled face. Taotaomo’na appear as ordinary people, sometimes wearing the features of a relative, and sometimes with no head at all or nothing where the face should be, which the old skull cult explains tidily enough. They take animal shapes: deer, coconut crab, dog, bird. One of them, the utak, is a large white-tailed bird whose shrill call carries across a village whenever an unmarried girl has fallen pregnant, a piece of folklore that is really a piece of social machinery. They announce themselves by smell before sight, sometimes sweet with ilangilang or lime or the fadang palm, sometimes like rubbish or worse. Their speech comes out as hissing, as the snap and grind of branches rubbed together, as ngokngok, or as CHamoru so archaic it is hard to follow. The named ones are stranger still. Gamson, the octopus, lived at Pago Bay beside a latte site and could take five fish at once with his bare hands and grate a coconut by squeezing the shell until the meat sprayed out of it. Anufat had fangs, long nails, and a wide open wound in his side with a large fern growing out of it. Gatos travelled with a retinue of lesser spirits and dealt with anyone who urinated on his ground by ensuring they would not comfortably do so again.

Strength is the point of them. A person who acquired one as a permanent companion was called gaitaotao or gaiga’chong, and moved through life visibly stronger than he had any business being. The harm they do is intimate and physical: a pinch, a bite, a touch, and then fever, or swelling, or the blank staring trance called chetnot manman, with finger and tooth marks surfacing on the skin in yellow and brown and purple. A subset called lamlamtaotao work the weather, pulling wind, rain, lightning and thunder down on people to frighten them. The duhendes, small and naked or dressed in leaves, take the shape of a red fantail and sing children off the path into the jungle, then shrink them so small that the search party walks over them without knowing.

For all that, they can be stopped, and the counters are domestic. Salt weakens them, which is the standard explanation for why they keep to the interior jungle rather than the salt-scoured coast; a CHamoru wrestler in the early twentieth century, unbeatable because of the spirit that walked with him, is said to have lost on the day his opponent sprinkled salt around the ring. Strong smells drive them off, and the list is unglamorous: onions, burnt rags, burnt dung, burnt banyan leaves. They will not approach money, a church, or blessed objects, and they cannot bear pregnant women and infants because they hate the odour of breast milk, which is the reason a baby is given salt to taste at baptism. When somebody does fall ill in a way that medicine cannot place, the treatment has not changed much in three centuries. Find a suruhanu, work out which ground was offended, go back to the exact spot, and apologise.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Taotao Mona?

Taotao Mona, meaning “the people of before,” are the ancestral spirits of the CHamoru people of Guam and the Mariana Islands. They are understood not as gods or as ordinary ghosts but as ancestors of superhuman strength who continue to own and guard the ground they held in life. Early Spanish accounts from the 1660s record an older term for the ancestral spirits, anite, and describe families keeping the skulls of their dead in the house to petition them.

Why do people ask permission before entering the jungle in Guam?

Because the jungle belongs to the Taotao Mona, and entering someone’s land without asking is an offence. The customary request addresses them as guella yan guello, grandmother and grandfather, and a second request is made before relieving oneself. Older rules recorded on Rota in the 1920s forbade singing, fouling the ground, cutting wood, picking fruit, digging yams, camping overnight and hunting fruit bats in another family’s district without permission.

What do the Taotao Mona look like?

They have no fixed appearance. They can look like ordinary people, occasionally wearing the face of a relative, and are also described as headless or faceless, which is often linked to the ancient CHamoru practice of keeping ancestral skulls. They also appear as deer, dogs, coconut crabs and birds, and a few named spirits are grotesque, such as Anufat, who has fangs, long nails and a large fern growing from an open wound in his side.

How do the Taotao Mona hurt people, and how do you protect yourself?

They cause illness by pinching, biting or touching, leaving finger and tooth marks in yellow, brown or purple and producing fever, swelling or a blank trance called chetnot manman. Salt is the classic protection, along with strong smells such as onions, burnt rags and burnt banyan leaves, and Catholic charms or blessed objects. A person made ill this way is treated by a suruhanu, a CHamoru healer, and usually has to return to the place where the offence happened and ask forgiveness.

Why are Taotao Mona associated with banyan trees?

The nunu, or banyan, is regarded as their dwelling place, and its curtain of aerial roots forms a dark hollow at the base of the tree. Around 1900 an elderly Guam resident told the naturalist William Safford that people would not pass a great nunu after dark because it was a haunt of the manganiti. The belief is strong enough that buildings at the University of Guam and other government sites were designed around existing banyans rather than removing them.

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